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About Matthew Wrather
Matthew Wrather started Overthinking It in 2008 with his smartest, funniest friends, and has hosted over 500 hours of podcasts on the site. An LA native, he is an actor and computer programmer, but has worked as a writer, tower bell-ringer, birthday party clown, poet, janitor, and call center manager. He also has a Twitter and a Tumblr.

I want to go on record, and hopefully start a flame war, by defending the walkie talkie replacement of the shotguns in E.T. It makes a lot more sense thematically to E.T., which is about communicating and adults getting back in touch with wonder. E.T. already made the point of that desire to reconnect mummifying the very thing you’re searching for, it didn’t need to separate the adults even further at that point by having them be threatening with shotguns.

Also there was a lot of violence in MAC and Me. The climax is a Peckinpah style shoot out with the police in a grocery store that ends with the store exploding in a giant fire ball then MAC and his family strut out of the flaming rubble like cold hardass mother f***ers. MAC does some Karate Kid rubbing hands healing stuff afterwards, but the shit got thick, it wasn’t all McDonald’s dance offs and bear suits.

True story: I didn’t see that scene because I ran out of Mac and Me crying about halfway through. The aliens freaked me out 8-year-old me too much. It was at a friend’s birthday party, too – the friend’s parents rented out the small suburban movie theater to show this new movie, and I had to be the killjoy (although I don’t think too many people really noticed).

The fun part was, to calm me down, the people at the movie theater took me into the projection booth and showed me how movie projection worked. It was really cool. This was of course before digital movie projectors, so there was cool mechanical stuff to see and big racks and appratus for the film.

So, all in all, Mac and Me was a net positive, but I never saw the end of the movie.

Yeah, but the ending of MAC and Me isn’t them flying off on a rainbow like E.T. The final scene is the MAC family in a courthouse packed with people all getting sworn in as American citizens. It’s all happy then they drive off on interstate in a 50’s pink Cadillac convertible. here’s the clip http://youtu.be/mWo9lJ_y7Do

Before MAC and Me I’ve never heard the “Oath of Allegiance” before, it’s kinda scary sounding. The lines “I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by law; that I will perform non-combatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by law” sound intimidating, and according the wikipedia page are sometimes omitted. The oath was written during the American Revolution and is based on the British Oath of Supremacy- not a very humbling origin story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Allegiance_%28United_States%29

But having that Oath in mind it’s striking how much of our movies reflected that idea, like ID4 follows those lines closely. I’m guessing Cowboys and Aliens does too.

I feel that a hummingbird has to be one of the lamest spirit animals in the western trope movie (and actually I called that whole scene the ‘Wesley Crusher peyote scene’ and got a few laughs from that), surely that Daniel Craig’s character could have come up with something cooler than a hummingbird…

The trailer for ‘Battleship’ made me do an actual *face!palm* when I realized what it was. The fact that it was made must add more fuel to the sentiment that Hollywood has run out of ideas. That being said, the idea of seeing it just to see how bad the movie is going to be is very tempting. Which is what they want us to do, right?

I don’t think it’s fair to say that Battleship proves that Hollywood has run out of ideas. An enormous amount of ideas are required to translate an extremely simple game like Battleship into a movie. 99.9% of the film has nothing to do with the game.

If anything, it’s a clever demonstration of how to pitch your original idea to a risk-averse studio, with a vague association to an established brand.

Well, in Europe or at least in western Europe, channels buy tv series and air them. In Italy SKY (Murdoch) has the monopoly of the satellite platform and broadcast most of the american (and british) series first. Premium channels of digital terrestrial television , especially Mediaset (Berlusconi) ,are trying to catch up. If you can’t afford premium or satellite you have to wait at least 1 year.
So we use torrents a lot…
I wish I can use Hulu!

Similarly, Sky basically owns the rights to every HBO show in the UK (now, at least, I think Sopranos was on Channel 4 (terrestrial commercial but more intellectual than the other two (ITV and Five (which is now owned by a facist and porn baron), and BBC showed at least part of The Wire, but from about Treme onwards belongs to Sky.

I’ve just started using hotspot shielding so I can watch Hulu – maybe not legal, but it means the creators still get rewarded.

Re: The Battleship teaser: Did anyone else catch that the alien missiles are shaped like the game pegs? And they don’t seem to explode the way most missiles or other projectiles might. They embed themselves into the side of the battleship the way they do in the game (but then presumably something must happen, otherwise what’s the point?)

I guess if you’re going to base your movie off a board game, you might as well go all out and use as much of the carcass as you possibly can.

I really need to see this one, if only to ponder how they deal with Native American culture for myself. If I’m interpreting you guys somewhat correctly, it sounds sort of like their alliance with the Native Americans is what tips the scale? So does someone come riding in, leading them as an outsider like Gandalf the White in The Two Towers, or Aragorn with his army of dead dudes in Return of the King? Or are they led by one of their own?